“Honestly, Karina, you can’t take on full responsibility for this. It’s not good for you, and at the end of the day, your brother is an adult . . . the same age as you. Or five minutes younger, if I remember?”

“Six.” I smiled and moved my hands down to her shoulder blades.

I knew she was right. Austin wasn’t my problem to solve, but that didn’t make it any easier.

I moved my hands along her skin, using a compression stroke. “You have to decide what’s best for you,” she said. “You’re starting a new chapter and you should have the most decluttered life possible.”

Easier said than done.

“I’ll ask my dad if he’s heard anything from him and leave it at that.” I hated asking my dad about my brother because, even if he was a mess right now, he was still his son, the golden child. I could never compete with Austin for Dad’s affection, no matter how hard I may have tried.

Tina didn’t say anything after that. She must have known that talking through the drama of “dinner with my family” would be too much for me this early in the day, so she enjoyed the rest of her treatment while my thoughts boiled inside my brain.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I attended to three more clients after Tina, and each of them occupied my mind in different ways. Stewart—I called her by the last name stitched into her ACUs—was an Army medic who had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. She kept me busy talking about her next post, about how, with her job, she could be stationed almost anywhere in the world, so being posted to Hawaii was like hitting the jackpot. It was nice to see her so happy. Part of me wanted to hide in her suitcase and run off to Hawaii and start all over. Maybe my anxiety wouldn’t follow me that far.

Some people loved to move around in the military, and Stewart was one of them. She was only a year older than me, but she’d already been deployed to Iraq—twice. And, man, did she have stories. At twenty-one, she’d had experiences most people couldn’t even imagine. But when those experiences turned into memories . . . well, they started playing through her mind on a constant loop. Never waning, never quiet, those memories became background noise, tolerable, but always there. I knew all about it. My dad’s brain was full of that clamor. With six tours between Iraq and Afghanistan, his background noise wasn’t just a personal soundtrack, it blared throughout our house. His house.